Siluria Technologies Inc. has signed deals with petrochemical company Braskem SA that will help the startup progress toward its goal of converting natural gas into chemicals and fuels at scale. San Francisco-based Siluria is also in the process of raising a Series D round of financing of between $30 million and $35 million, said Ed Dineen, the company’s chief executive. Siluria aims to make the production of ethylene, one of the world’s most widely used chemicals, cheaper and cleaner via its catalyst technology.

IT infrastructure vendor Nutanix Inc. has raised $101 million at a valuation of about $1 billion to take on some of the tech industry’s biggest companies as it works to remake ponderous and expensive corporate data centers. The push to make data centers more scalable, more efficient and cheaper as global Internet usage continues to grow is a long-term threat to EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other companies that sell hardware to run the back-end computing backbones of big companies.

Also in today’s VentureWire, Contently Inc., operator of a marketplace where writers can connect with companies engaged in “content marketing” online, has raised $9 million in Series B funding led by Sigma Prime and Sigma West…Moderna Therapeutics Inc., which has attracted private investors and corporate partners with its technology for developing new types of drugs called messenger RNA therapies, has launched Onkaido Therapeutics LLC to use this capability to develop cancer medicines…and Betting on yet another travel technology company, Technology Crossover Ventures has led a $30 million growth round in SiteMinder Pty. Ltd.

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